Word: ravinia
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When the late Real-Estate Operator Louis Eckstein was its hovering angel, Ravinia Park, on the North Shore near Chicago, was one of the best spots in the U. S. for summer music. Sponsored now by a committee of Chicagoans, Ravinia is still good. Its opening week, fortnight ago, attracted the largest crowd in its history, more than 10,000 people. Last week, when bolt-upright, beaky, baldish Sir Adrian Boult, music director of British Broadcasting Corp., opened his second week with the Chicago Symphony, a heat wave melted the attendance. Those who braved the swelter heard, and lustily applauded...
Customers of hot-weather music have no very intense convictions about what is played to them. This fact is known to every conductor, every musician who plays Beethoven's Fifth Symphony with his eyes shut. In Chicago's Ravinia Park last fortnight, to give the program committee some ideas for next summer's series by the Chicago Symphony, questionnaires were handed to the 8,000 people who went to concerts during the week. Only 550 bothered to answer the questionnaire...
...Favorite Ravinia composers proved to be Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Franck, Bach, Sibelius-in that order. This suggested nothing new to the committee, since Wagner, Brahms and Beethoven were most frequently played at Ravinia this summer. Only 4% were bored by any one number, only 8% enjoyed one just moderately. The rest enjoyed everything greatly, except for five people who were bored by a whole program, ten by half of a program. One person asked for a special number next summer-"Roosevelt's Funeral March." The committee decided to look elsewhere than in questionnaires for program ideas...
Twenty-six years ago Louis Eckstein, rich Chicago merchant and real-estate operator, began sponsoring summer music in Ravinia Park, 37 acres of woodland which he owned on Chicago's North Shore. Depression interrupted the concerts in 1932 and Patron Eckstein died in 1935 before they were resumed. When his widow agreed to let Ravinia be used for summer music again, 25 businessmen raised $30,000 and reopened Ravinia last summer (TIME, July 13). Back to Chicago last week went Lucrezia Bori, Leon Rothier and Mario Chamlee (Archer Ragland Cholmondeley) who had helped make Ravinia opera nationally known...
...Archer Ragland Cholmondeley) has given almost 100 impersonations of Marouf, the cobbler who runs away from his nagging wife, pretends to be a rich merchant, makes a monkey of the Sultan of Khaitan and marries the Sultan's daughter. Chamlee first took the part nine years ago at Ravinia Park (Chicago), later in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Lille and Brussels. When he arrived to sing his first Marouf in Paris, Composer Rabaud kept him up till 3 a.m. going over the score, called him a "delicious interpreter...